Breast self-exams with creepy Mona Lisa paperholders are, oddly, not recommended.

Day 20 sees us two-thirds of the way into this enterprise, which makes it a good time to step back (somewhat) from the silliness and check up on the components of Beards4Boobs:

Beards? Present, accounted for, and slowly growing in various patchy, man-like ways.

Beards4Boobs? We're at a mind-blowing $1,676.25, creeping ever closer to our goal of $2,500. We still have 10 days left, and these crackling virility hedges need more green fertilizer to intercalate! Please consider donating if you haven't had a chance to yet.

Boobs? The medical news of the week is that the US Preventative Services Task Force (part of the US Department of Health) issued new breast cancer screening guidelines to physicians that have many people a-buzz. The upshot is that they now recommend screening mammograms starting in asymptomatic women at age 50 and happening every two years, as opposed to age 40 and occurring annually. Their reasoning is that in the 40-50 year old age group, the benefits of detecting breast cancers are counterbalanced by the costs of false positive results and unneeded surgical procedures in the average, healthy woman.

While many are having strong negative reactions to this, it's important to keep a few things in mind. Guidelines such as these are intended to guide physicians in approaching the average, healthy person, not any one particular patient, especially those with family history of breast cancer or other risk factors. Other professional societies are in disagreement with these, and I doubt many physicians will substantially change the way they practice due to these new recommendations alone. Finally, these new guidelines themselves make a big point of saying that physicians and patients should have discussions of how to individually plan such an important medical screening task, which is both common sense, and the entire point of the matter.

Enough SCIENCE... on to the beard!

Sensation: no abnormal sensory input

Palpation: soft intercalation continues

Personal satisfaction rating: 3 (out of 5 Norsemen)